Tag: Robert Hughes

For someone like me, of a generation brought to visual consciousness amidst gallery-goers who understand paintings through a camera lens and a Google search, a first reaction to the work of Giorgio Morandi is often not dissimilar to helplessness. “Is that it?”, one wonders on seeing one of his still life paintings of a few vases and vessels. Then, when one sees a few more: Is this some kind of trick? And, upon seeing room after room of Morandi’s vases and jugs, bottles and biscuit tins: Did he really have nothing more to say?

But that won’t happen at Artipelag, a new modern museum set gently upon an island in Stockholm’s archipelago. For when you finally arrive at some of Morandi’s best work, collected from private and public collections around the world, you will have been primed to slow down, to forget the phone, to forget whatever tasks you had to get done today and whatever He Who Must Not Be Named said on Twitter—and to simply look.

Edmund de Waal is responsible for this, as his work occupies the first half of the exhibition in a cavernous space, more glass than wall, with slices of view out to pine trees and Sweden’s grey, brackish water (these views are still life too, if not natura morta). Depending how you first come across de Waal you may know him either as a writer or a potter. He is both, and he does both very well from his London studio. The Hare With the Amber Eyes is his family memoir published in 2010.

At Artipelag de Waal is a potter. He has created hundreds of small, cylindrical porcelain vases and vessels, finished in various glazes of whites and blacks, and has set them inside cases and vitrines. Some of these cases are set upon slabs of transparent plexiglass so that they appear to hover in space; some are transparent, inviting analysis of de Waal’s vessels, and others are opaque, so that merely the shadows of the vessels can be seen. One vitrine, Epyllion (2013) is entirely opaque when you stand close to it, and entirely transparent when viewed from a distance.

De Waal’s vases are all empty, of course—empty of matter. But over time it began to seem as if they held time and presence, since the more I looked the more I became aware of myself standing in the gallery. Or rather, lying here in the gallery, as his stunning Atmosphere (2014) pieces hang from the ceiling with conveniently placed long couches below. “My cloudscapes”, de Waal calls them—catching “The fugitive movement of the sky”.

It is particularly true in both de Waal’s and Morandi’s work that the more you put in the more you get out—spend time with these vessels, walk in between them and around them, lie beneath them and in front of them, and they just continue to give. “To spend time is to explore time”, de Waal writes in the exhibition catalogue—“This process is not a means to an end.” Here our modern conception of time is flipped upside down, and we find ourselves not investing it or even spending it—not aiming for some future, cultured return—but simply observing it.

Where Minimalist art of the 70s and 80s makes us conscious of space, de Waal and Morandi’s work makes us conscious of time. If you happen to see Richard Serra’s massive steel sculptures in the Guggenheim Bilbao shortly before or after this exhibition in Stockholm, you will notice curious resonances. Each exhibition occupies similarly massive spaces; each artist dominates the space he occupies, though they do so in different ways; and each is similarly resistant to movements and labels, despite America’s need for labels forcing Serra into the Minimalism box. Perhaps most significantly, each artist suspends himself in time and space: de Waal quite literally with his hanging and floating, transparent and opaque vessels; Serra by changing our path through space and in his use of a timeless material; Morandi, by being a modern Old Master—by painting still lives in oil on canvas during Duchamp’s lifetime, by in turn ignoring Futurism and the return to order despite living in Italy, and by rejecting all modern demands of change and progress in his own work. And all of them, by returning us to a time where art was free of avant-gardist teleology—“You feel suddenly free”, Robert Hughes wrote of being inside Serra’s Guggenheim sculptures, “far from the dead zone of mass-media quotation, released from all that vulgar, tedious postmodernist litter and twitter…” This art aspires not to newness, but to timelessness.

Jeff Koons created The New, and contrasted it with The Old. In de Waal and Morandi’s work no such opposition exists. Enter this gallery and you exit Modernism’s conception of time and progress, leaving behind along with it all that is pre and post, avant-garde and rear-guard, money and metrics, fame and fortune. “What matters is to touch the core, the essence of things”, said Morandi of his art—and here one gets close to that, finding oneself held still in reality. And after all, Morandi added, “Nothing is more abstract than reality.”

About

Welcome. This is the personal website of Michael Moore-Jones. I'm a New Zealander and a Philosophy, Politics and Economics student at Yale-NUS College. I've previously studied at Yale University and ten other academic institutions in six countries.